Caris stared out the window at the damaged and undamaged streets they passed on the drive back home. Nathaniel was there to greet her when they arrived, opening the door to offer her his hand, as he always did. Whether it was for dancing or a walk or an escort, he thought nothing of being by her side, providing support she desperately needed as she pretended all the while she knew what she was doing.
He lifted his other hand to her face, brushing his knuckles over the arch of her cheekbone. Despite the heat of the day, his shirt was done up to the collar, cravat knotted tight around his throat. “Would you like tea brought to you in your laboratory?”
It was a wonder how he knew what she always needed when sometimes even she didn’t know. “Please.”
“I’ll bring it to you.”
Clearing her mind was easier to do when she had something to occupy her hands. Nathaniel saw her to her small laboratory in the rear garden before excusing himself to return to the main house and prepare a tea tray for her. Caris set about opening the windows and turning on all the mechanical fans for better airflow, then tied up her hair and pulled a large folio off the shelf. She set it on her worktable and opened it, peering down at the sketched-out designs for attaching a pistol’s barrel to Blaine’s mechanical prosthetic.
The sound of the door opening made her hum. “That was quick.”
“I suppose twenty-one yearsisquick for me.”
The voice didn’t belong to Nathaniel. Caris’ head jerked up, mouth opening to call for help even as starfire sparked at her fingertips, when the words strangled themselves in her throat.
The woman standing before her wore neat trousers and a white blouse whose short sleeves allowed her to show off the constellation tattoo on her right arm. Caris tracked the lines and starbursts of the Wolf constellation on the North Star’s arm, the gold an impossible color in her skin. But then, star gods were the stuff of dreams and prayers, if their history was anything to go by.
Caris shoved away from the worktable and hastily sank down into a curtsy. Her parents had drilled into her a respect for their country’s guiding star that had never left her, even if her mother and father had.
“My lady,” she croaked out, clenching her hands into fists so they would hopefully stop trembling. She didn’t know what had drawn the North Star here, but Caris rather hoped that Aaralyn wouldn’t condemn her for the choices she’d made on behalf of Ashion.
“You have grown,” Aaralyn said, her voice a rich cadence in Caris’ ears.
Caris rose out of her curtsy and dared to lift her head to meet the North Star’s gaze. “I haven’t a memory of you.”
Aaralyn smiled slightly as she stepped closer, the air in the laboratory becoming stifling with her presence. “Not with this face, no.”
She reached the worktable, and her features shimmered as if she was pulling on a veil, and Caris’ eyes widened at the face revealed to her for a handful of seconds before Aaralyn’s natural features returned. “Youtaught me to control my magic?”
For a moment, Aaralyn had stood before Caris as the star priestess who’d taught her in secret when the clarion crystals’ songs became too loud for her to resist as a child. Later, it had been that same star priestess who had warned of the dangers of revealing the starfire that burned in her soul. Caris had held those teachings close when she’d left Cosian for Amari several years ago. She’d followed the rules set down for her right up until the riot in Amari, when to keep that secret meant damning her people to die.
“I have been your guiding star since Ophelia prayed for me to save you,” Aaralyn said, hazel eyes never blinking.
Caris thought about the beginning of her road that Blaine had told her about and all that came after. She’d wondered but daren’t ask her parents, whose road she had overtaken when she was barely hours old. “You gave me away. You bade the Dusk Star to flee with me.”
“You have never regretted that.”
Caris flinched. “Haven’t I, my lady?”
Aaralyn tipped her head to the side, studying Caris with a gravity to her gaze that burned like starfire. Her attention was anything but easy. “You don’t, for if you did, you would protest the crown others have given you.”
It was a rank in name only, for all the jewels meant for the starfire throne had been destroyed during the Inferno, and the ones Eimarille claimed as hers were Daijal-made. Caris was queen, made that way by everyone’s belief, not a crown that had never rested on her head. But it was something Eimarille coveted and which Soren flatly refused the same way he refused his name. Unlike Soren, Caris couldn’t bring herself to walk away from what it meant to be of the Rourke bloodline and all it entailed.
“My name isn’t even written down in the royal genealogies.”
“That was done to protect you. If you’d been in the records, my husband’s Blades would have found you.”
Caris crossed her arms over her chest, shoulders hunching forward a little. “If you could save me, why couldn’t you save Eimarille? Or Soren, who I don’t even know is still alive?”
Aaralyn shrugged. “I gave your brother to the Dawn Star and the Eclipse Star to make him a warden.”
“And Eimarille?”
Aaralyn stepped closer, resting the fingertips of both hands on the worktable. “I let my husband take her.”
“I fail to see how that decision saved her if it brought the world to war.”
“Oh, child. It was never about saving one person, or even three, but about ensuring the future of Maricol remains firmly plantedhereand not in the stars.”
